|
Leslie Mutchler’s collages, digital drawings, recycled paper and coroplast installations stem from an investigation into consumer desires to purchase an organized lifestyle. Using catalogue glossies from Crate & Barrel, Ikea, Pottery Barn, and others, she creates a hybrid-form of organization that speaks about the many tastes and design influences surrounding our consumer culture. Mutchler’s research focuses on furniture that functions solely as storage; it contains one’s belongings as it continues to perpetuate a want of more. She is intrigued by such a device’s ability to eliminate an accumulation of belongings into one unified object and thus the accumulation’s ability to live under a minimal guise of solidarity. Mutchler builds structures, landscapes, and objects of perfection, utilizing paper (once fresh- now recycled) as a primary source material. These utopian structures fall continuously short- at times resolving themselves as an exercise in futility- full of almosts and blurred absolutes. But much like her modernist predecessors the work begins and ends engaged in a sincere desire to learn perfection.
Jason Urban’s work is located in the hazy area between art and design. Though formally trained as a printmaker, he prefers the term print media artist as it more accurately reflects the expansive nature of the discipline. Urban’s work incorporates figures from disparate realms: politics, science fiction, and nature are a few sources. The interference of the human hand and layering of pattern and color create a “camouflaged” picture plane- an ambiguous place left open to interpretation. Through juxtaposition of an evolving and growing vocabulary of icons, the potential of new relationships is revealed. Ultimately, these images share a tension between reality and fantasy, humor and drama, larger-than-life characters, worlds in conflict, and suspension of disbelief.
Sarah Bryant is letter printer and bookbinder whose editioned artist’s books have been collected by The Yale Arts Library, Harvard University, UCLA and Atelier V’s-a’Vis in Marseille, France. Sarah is currently the Victor Hammer Fellow in the Book Arts at Wells College in Aurora, New York. Her books explore the simple visual language used to describe the complex systems that sustain and surround us. According to Bryant: “It is my hope that these books force a new consideration of these familiar systems of images and text. I choose the book form as a means to utilize sequence in my work. It is impossible to view each book all at once and consequently I am able to guide my viewer through a piece in my own way, pacing their experience with folded pages, layered imagery, and text.”
|
